15 MPH Winds from the North

Today we arrived to yet another unbelievably warm welcome to Gypsum, Kansas. A sign at the edge of town read, "Welcome Habitat for Humanity Cyclists," and I just got up from a long conversation with a reporter from a Salina (pronounced Sa-Lie-Na with that unusual Kansas way of pronouncing towns) newspaper.

We rode 95 miles today on terrain that was not quite flat but we were shadowed the entire way by those Great Plains winds, which we're told are unusually strong this year. But we're all sitting comfortably in the Gypsum Community Center right now with a cookie-to-rider ratio of about 14.6 so life is good.

In Kansas, the roads are flanked by one of three things: wheat, soybeans, or corn. The wheat's pretty much fully cut for the year, but the corn is growing tall (some of our riders got into a cornfield and ate sweet corn straight from the stalk...) and the crops sway in the breeze as you bike by. It's easy to see why Willa Cather described the appearance of wind in the fields as an ocean in My Antonia (well, she was talking about Nebraska, but even people here will agree that there isn't much that differentiates this from Nebraska).

Thanks for the mail! We just cleaned up house at the little post office here and smiles abound.

I'm logging a few too many hours in what we call "chamois time" on HBC South (i.e. unnecessary time spent wearing the terrible spandex cycling shorts) so I'm going to catch a shower, but stay posted as we head deeper into the Kansas flats...

-Eric

PS Here's another haiku I failed to include last time, on the theme of chamois time, composed by Matt Kotler, David Madden, and yours truly:

This seat hurts my butt.
Three days of chamois rash sucks.
Butt press on I must.